What's New

There is a terminal command called alias, that many users may not know exists, but likely will be very happy to find out about it.

The alias command, allows you to redefine what you type, to make things happen. It gives you the option to map large commands to an alias that you may run then instead of the large command to execute it.

A very straightforward (although risky) example of this would be:

alias dla="rm -rf *"

The developers of Pale Moon released two new versions of the browser in the past couple of days. Pale Moon 27.8.0 was released on March 2, 2018 and the follow-up release Pale Moon 27.8.1 on March 6, 2018.

Pale Moon users who want to update to the newest version may do so from within the application. A click on the Pale Moon button and the selection of Help > About Pale Moon displays the current version of the browser in a new window. A click on "check for updates" runs an update check.

Windows Firewall Control is a standalone program for Microsoft Windows PCs that extends the functionality of the built-in Windows Firewall and improves manageability significantly.

A free version is provided but you need to donate to the developer to get a lifetime license for the registered version which adds a notification system for outbound connections and an option to create temporary rules.

Microsoft released the cumulative update KB4090913 for Windows 10 version 1709 (Fall Creators Update) on March 5, 2018. The update fixes an issue with some USB devices connected to the Windows 10 device.

Nemp is an open source music player for Microsoft Windows PCs with a rich feature set that runs on very old versions of Windows as well as all supported versions of the operating system.

Nemp, which stands for Noch Ein MP3 Player (Yet Another MP3 Player), is offered as a portable program. You can run the music player without installation, for instance on a USB Drive that stores your music collection.

Windows Firewall Control 5.1 is the latest version of the security program for Windows that extends the functionality of the built-in firewall called Windows Firewall.

We reviewed Windows Firewall Control back in 2009 for the first time and concluded that it was an excellent application for Windows systems that were configured to use Windows Firewall for protection.

Microsoft plans to release the next feature update for the Windows 10 operating system in March/April of 2018. The company switched to a "two feature updates per year" release schedule  which means that it will release a feature update in the Fall as well.

Leaked documents suggest that Microsoft calls the update Spring Creators Update. The company has not revealed the name officially yet, though.

Windows couldn't be installed. We couldn't update the system reserved partition is an error message that you may receive when you try to upgrade Windows.

I ran into the issue on a machine running Windows 10 Insider Builds but users experienced the issue in earlier versions of Windows as well. The error seemed to be common on Windows 8.1 systems that users tried to upgrade to Windows 10.

Internet users from Germany who try to access the international website of Project Gutenberg, a free ebook repository (and audiobooks),  get a "Your IP address is blocked" message when they attempt to load any page on the site with the exception of the homepage.

I’ve been a D&D Player for a long time, but have been without a campaign now for a few years. I’ve spoken to some friends, and there seems to be some building interest in starting an online campaign on such a website like Roll20.

Protector IV is a free online tower defense game in which you follow a main quest and complete side-quests to level up your character and heroes.

Each game begins with the creation of the main character. You answer a handful of questions that determine initial bonuses, e.g. magic or ranged combat. You learn later that there are basic skills and talents that your main character may learn or acquire. These skills and talents give bonuses to your heroes and the troops they let you recruit.

Volume Concierge 2 is a free program for Microsoft Windows PCs that lets you configure automatic rules that change the system volume.

You can change the volume for individual applications on Windows, but you cannot make any other modifications to it.

Maybe, you'd like the volume to be lower in the morning or late at night, and higher throughout the day. Or, you want the volume to be high on the weekend when you play all that rock music on your PC, or very low late at night when you listen to an audiobook before you fall asleep.

I previously wrote an article about the tools I use for GNU/Linux and photography, and mentioned the ones I personally have made the most use of. One application that was only mentioned in passing, that I felt deserved its own article, is darktable. Like many applications available on GNU/Linux systems, darktable is cross-platform, and also available on Windows and MacOS systems.

After spending months using Grammarly's browser extension -- the Firefox add-on most often -- I have come to like and dislike the extension. You can check out my Grammarly Premium review for a rundown on features.

In this article, I will concentrate on issues that I experienced while using Grammarly.

AdBlock, a popular adblocking extension for Google Chrome, Mozilla Firefox and other browsers, and not to be confused with Adblock Plus, comes with a new local content caching option in its recent version for Chrome.